The Trip
by BrucasGrl309
Summary: It was one specific picture that made me freeze. It was one of Charlotte, standing in front of the Eiffel tower, hands cupped beneath the swell of a pregnant belly. Chuck ,I thought.' Chuck/Blair ONESHOT


For Emma, Joi, and Cayley. Did you ever think, one month later, that you would have made such a huge difference in so many people's lives? You'll never be forgotten. RIP and Merry Christmas.

To everyone else, I also wish you a Merry Christmas! Even if you don't celebrate.

Enjoy the story and forgive any mistakes. I didn't edit.

* * *

I checked my messages for the thirtieth time as I paced back and forth in Chuck's living room. Chuck had been 'out thinking' for the last two days. He had just found out that his mother wasn't dead. She was actually very much alive. I understood that he wanted to be alone, I truly did, but I was getting worried. What if his driver was having an off day? What if their limo slipped on the ice and drove off of some bridge into the frigid water below? I decided to text him for the second time. My first message had been something along the lines of _I'm here for you. Always. _I had wanted to sound like the loving and romantic girlfriend that I believed Chuck needed right then. However, I was _not_ okay with being ignored. He should have known after the first day that I would start to worry. My second message read: _'Get your ass back here. You've got two hours.' _This time, I wanted to sound serious and angry. He might never have had a mother around but he did have a girlfriend. If I had to act like his mother ever now and then to keep him safe then I would. I wasn't afraid of Chuck Bass.

I sat down on the couch and slipped my shoes off. It was exhausting being worried. I thought about being a mother and being this worried constantly. I would go crazy. It made no sense to me how any woman, especially someone who had just given birth to a tiny baby boy, could leave her family. I was angry at whoever this women was. This women who brought her dead ex-husband flowers and still called her son 'Charles'. If she wanted to escape and leave, then she should have done a better job at it. Who comes back only to run away again? It made no sense.

There was a knock on the door and a smile spread across my mouth. It was a relief that Chuck had listened to my message and had come home to me. I called "If I were you, Chuck, I'd run. I'm going to _kill_you." He hesitated before opening the door and coming inside. I turned, expecting to see my boyfriend. However, the person in front of me, with the same black hair and bone structure, wasn't Chuck. "I guess Charles isn't here." She said with a nervous smile, glancing around the room.

"You're Chuck's mother." I said, sucking a breath. The resemblance was startling. If I had seen her walking down the street, I would have known instantly who she was. "You're Chuck's mother and you're _here_."

She nodded with a smile, taking a step towards me. "I'm assuming that you're close to him. A girlfriend, perhaps? He must have told you about seeing me in the cemetery."

It took me a few minutes to get my thoughts together. I nodded back, "I'm Chuck's girlfriend and yes, he told me about seeing you. He's...out right now."

She was a smart women. She saw right through my lie. "It's okay. Not knowing where Charles is doesn't make you a bad girlfriend. I understand that he would want to be alone."

"Well, I'm glad that at least you realize what you've done to him. Leaving him with his incompetent father for all of these years. Pretending to be dead. Coming back. What sort of person does that?"

She nodded, "Not a very good person. That's why I left..." She trailed off, obviously wondering what to call me.

"My name is Blair." I couldn't understand why I wasn't hitting her over the head with my purse. I _should_ have wanted to strangle her but I didn't. There was something about this women. Something terribly heartbreaking.

She smiled, "It's very nice to meet you, Blair. It's sort of a relief to know that he isn't here right now. I had no idea what to say. How do you explain being gone for nineteen years? It's a very complicated story."

"You could start by explaining it to me. Chuck would have probably slammed the door in your face if he was here. Perhaps if I knew the story, I could explain it to him."

She smiled and buttoned up her coat. "Would you like to take a walk with me, Blair? There is somewhere important that I'll need to show you. It's the only way that I'll have a chance at making you understand."

Even back then, I knew that this was going to be important. I needed to follow her and listen as carefully as I possibly could. It was the only way to save Chuck.

* * *

We caught a taxi and she told the driver an address somewhere in Brooklyn. "Where are we going?" I asked.

She smiled and sat back in her seat. "You'll know that Bart wasn't always rich. Just like a lot of successful people, he started off at the bottom." And so her story began.

_"Run away with me, Charlotte. We'll run away and never look back." Bart said, cupping my face in his hands. _

_I shook my head, "My dad would kill me, Bart. He's already going to kill me when he finds out about us."_

_Bart sighed and let go of my face. He covered his face with his hands and stayed silent for a few minutes. "Why is it so difficult for people to understand that age doesn't make a difference when it comes to love? Why is it considered wrong to love someone, just because they're in high school and you aren't?"_

_I smiled and took his hand in mine. "They think that you are manipulating how I feel about you. They think that I'm too young to understand what love is and that you must be taking advantage of that ignorance."_

_"Don't they realize that you're the brilliant and mature one? You're more of an adult than I am."_

_"No, they don't realize." I said, feeling myself blush. "I love you, Bart, and I'm willing to wait a few years before we can openly be together." _

_"And until then?" He asked, turning to face me. _

_I smiled and kissed him. "We'll continue to meet in hotel rooms."_

"So he was an older man?" I asked her, as the taxi stopped in front of a small brownstone. "And you were still in high school."

She nodded and pointed at the house. "I lived in this house for my entire childhood. Bart lived right next door until he turned eighteen. I was only three when he left so I don't remember much. I met him for the first time when he came to visit his parents for Christmas. I was sixteen and he was thirty two. My parents were close to his parents and so they invited us over to meet him. At that point, he already owned property in Manhattan and was doing quite well. He had big dreams and it was clear that he loved what he was doing."

Charlotte took a few bills out of her purse and handed them to the driver before getting out. I got out as well and followed her up the steps to the house. She took out a key and eased the door open. We both stepped inside. Seeing the inside of the house was startling. There were white sheets covering all of the furniture.

"When my parents died a few years ago, they left me the house in their will." She shrugged, "I couldn't sell it but I couldn't live in it either. Too many memories. Both good and bad."

"Why didn't you just rent it out?" I asked, walking with her into the kitchen. She took off her gloves and jacket, draped them across the kitchen table, also covered in a sheet.

She shrugged, "It's hard to imagine anyone else living here. Maybe I was being selfish but I wanted to keep things exactly the way I remembered them."

And with that, I followed her upstairs. She took me into one of the bedrooms. There were also sheets draped over the furniture. She pulled the sheets off, transforming the room into something with life. "This was my room. When I wasn't at school or with Bart, I was here."

I walked up to one of the walls, noticing the pictures taped up. They were pictures of a younger Charlotte, standing beside three other girls, laughing and seemingly carefree. None of the pictures hinted at what she did when she wasn't with her friends.

"You're probably wondering where I kept the pictures of Bart and I." She smiled and reached beneath her bed. She pulled out an envelope, brown and crumbled with age, and passed it to me. "All those years, I can't believe my parents never looked under my bed."

I sat down on her bed and it creaked under me. I opened the envelope and pulled out the photographs. These reminded me so much of photographs that I had taken with Chuck. A picture of a young Bart, sitting on the beach in shorts and t-shirt, smiling at the girl behind the camera. The look on his face told me that Charlotte was right. They really had been in love. There were several pictures of the two of them kissing and posing together. I noticed the buildings behind them. It wasn't New York. It wasn't even North America. It was Europe. As I continued flipping through the pictures, I felt my heart drop and my lips go numb. It was one specific picture that made me freeze. It was one of Charlotte, standing in front of the Eiffel tower, hands cupped beneath the swell of a pregnant belly. _Chuck_, I thought.

_"It's Bart and his fiance, Mom. Who could be better?" I traced a finger over the smooth edge of my cup of coffee. Even though I couldn't drink it, I still enjoyed the warmth of holding the cup in my hand and that amazing coffee smell that seemed to spread around the room._

_My mother leaned forward in her chair and put her face in her hands. "I just don't understand how you of all people could do something like this." She lifted her head and wiped away a few tears. "Didn't living in Brooklyn motivate you to strive for something better? Charlotte, a baby changes everything."_

_I felt a push against my ribs and I nodded. "Exactly. If it wasn't for this baby, Mom, I wouldn't have realized how badly I want to get out of Brooklyn. That's why I'm giving him or her to Bart. I trust him. I know that he'll love this baby as if he was the biological father."_

_I hated lying to my mother. She trusted me the same way I trusted Bart. Every word I spoke and every idea that I proposed, no matter how ridiculous, she couldn't help but believe. That's what love does to you. It makes you see things differently. It makes you do irrational things. Like believing your teenager daughter. Like having sex while you're still in high school. Like trusting Bart with your son._

The next photograph was of Charlotte holding a teeny tiny little baby in her arms. She was smiling, proudly showing off her son. The next one was of the three of them, a little family. Then the pictures began to change. Instead of Charlotte holding Chuck, another woman was holding him. She was young and beautiful with long brown hair.

Charlotte took the picture of the women and her son from me. "Vivienne took everything so well. I think that she loved Bart enough and wanted a baby badly enough to forgive what we had done. Vivienne, being such a mother from the beginning, wanted to help me."

"She knew about Bart and you?" I asked, shocked.

Charlotte nodded, "Oh, Bart told her everything the second he found out I was pregnant. At first she _almost_ killed him. Then he told her about our idea. He told her that I was willing to give up our child. She could be a mother." She laughed, shaking her head. "That bastard bribed her with a child! My child!"

"And you just handed your baby over to the two of them?" Now I was beginning to get angry again.

"Blair, I loved Bart. I loved him so much but I knew that we could never be a family. Bart and Vivienne had enough money and love between the two of them to give Charles the best life possible."

"What happened to Vivienne?" I asked, realizing that she was the woman in the photographs that Chuck had. She was the one that he believed was his mother.

Charlotte sighed, touching the picture of Vivienne. "It's strange how life works sometimes. One minute, everything is perfect and the next...When she was out walking one morning, about six months after we came back, she just dropped. The doctors say that she probably had the aneurysm for years without knowing it and it just decided to burst that day. Bart was heartbroken over her death. It turned him into the cold and bitter man that you knew. He didn't even want to see me again. He made me promise never to bother _his_ family. It was as if we never even happened."

"So Bart never really lied? His wife did die." Blair whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

Charlotte checked her watch before getting up from the bed. "We need to go. You need to get back to Chuck and I need to get back to my family."

"Family?" Blair asked.

She nodded and tried to smile. "I did exactly what my mom wanted me to do; get out of Brooklyn. I married a man that still makes me very happy and I have two wonderful children. We moved from down the street to a house in Southampton last year."

"So you've lived this nearby since everything happened? Since you gave up Chuck?"

She nodded. "Yes."

"Why would you live so close? Why would you do that to yourself?"

"I liked knowing that he was nearby. It's hard to understand, I know, but it was a strange comfort for the longest time." I followed her down the stairs and out of the house that held so many memories for her. Right before she closed the door, I glanced back once, trying to memorize where Chuck spent his very first days and nights, twisting and kicking inside Charlotte's belly.

* * *

We drove in silence back to Chuck's apartment. I watched as we passed house after house. Brooklyn had never meant anything important to me until today. Now I couldn't help but think about the lives of the people inside those homes. These were dozens of teenage girls mending broken hearts. Some families were even dealing with loss and death. People were living their worst nightmares and yet the sun still rose every morning. After today, I looked at the world a little bit differently.

When the taxi stopped in front of Chuck's building, I knew that this was goodbye. I turned to Charlotte and smiled, "I don't know if Chuck would believe me if I told him what happened today."

"Even if he doesn't believe you, the story will still make him think..." She shrugged, "...Telling you really made me think. Maybe I wasn't such a terrible person after all."

"You weren't terrible, Charlotte. You were just a kid." I explained.

"Thank you, Blair." Charlotte smiled and really seemed to appreciate what I had said. "It really means a lot to hear you say that."

I took a deep breath. There was more that I wanted to say to her. "You weren't a terrible person, Charlotte, because you were a kid. But you aren't a kid anymore and you haven't been one for years. Chuck will forgive you for what you did when you were in high school because he knows all about being a teenager and being an idiot. But Charlotte, I can't explain to him why a woman in her twenties or even thirties wouldn't try to reach out to her son. He won't understand that part until he's your age and a father." I licked my lips, hoping that she wouldn't strangle me when I was finished. "I don't think I'll understand until I'm your age and a mother."

Charlotte seemed taken back by everything. She cleared her throat and tried to smile. "That's alright, Blair."

As her taxi drove off, I stood on the curb, wondering about what I would have done in her situation. It must have been so hard. She put all of her trust in Bart and he let her down. He wasn't the man that she thought he was when she fell in love with him. At least he hadn't been for a very long time. The death of Vivienne changed him and he never changed back. But what would he have done if she hadn't let him walk all over her? What if she had said "Screw it, you're not pushing me away, Bart. You're my family and I love you."? Eventually, I think he would have let her in again and Charlotte's dream would have come true. If Charlotte hadn't given up on Bart, Chuck could have grown up knowing his mother.

* * *

Chuck came back late that night. I heard the door open and close behind him. Then there was silence. I sat up in bed, pulling my legs up against my chest. I was relieved when I saw his silhouette appear in the doorway. "Where the hell have you been?" I asked him loudly.

He shrugged his jacket off before unbuttoning his shirt. "Out. Thinking." He said as he climbed in beside me. I pulled away, feeling the anger build up inside of me. Did he just expect me to wait around every time he got upset and left?

"Fuck you, Chuck." I went to slap him across his face but before I knew it, he pressed his face against mine. He was kissing me and I was letting him. Still, I didn't move to touch him.

"I'm so sorry. If it helps, I really missed you." He whispered, touching my face with the tips of his fingers. "Next time, I want you to come with me."

"Where were you?" I asked.

"At first, I ended up back at my father's grave. I wanted to see if maybe she would come back." He shrugged, "I waited all night."

"Chuck," I began, suddenly feeling sorry for him. He waited all night in a graveyard for his mom to show up. It was at times like this that I could see what he was like as a little boy. "I have a story to tell you."


End file.
